Democracy in Central
and Eastern Europe
One Hundred Years On
East European Politics and
Societies and Cultures
Volume 27 Number 1
February 2013 90-107
© 2013 SAGE Publications
10.1177/0888325412465310
http://eeps.sagepub.com
hosted at
http://online.sagepub.com
Grzegorz Ekiert
Daniel Ziblatt
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA
In the twenty years since communism’s collapse, scholars of postcommmunist Central
and Eastern Europe have increasingly converged on the insight that long-run continuities reaching back to the nineteenth century are crucial in shaping some of the most
important contemporary macro- and micro-level political outcomes in the region.
Today’s political cleavages, political discourses, patterns of partisan affiliation, institutional choice, and the quality of democracy itself all appear to correlate to a remarkable
degree with patterns from the “deep past.” To date, social scientists, however, have not
sufficiently reflected on what might explain this finding and how to study the impact of
the general phenomenon of the long-run in the region. This article makes two contributions. First, we contend that in general, long-run continuities may ironically be more
important in contexts of discontinuous institutional change such as in Central and
Eastern Europe since frequent institutional disjunctures paradoxically open chasms
between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual change and producing patterns of institutional mimicry to cope with institutional ruptures. This insight may travel
to other contexts of weak institutionalization. Second, we reject efforts to identify “deep
causes” of contemporary outcomes without specifying how intervening events and crises intersect with these longer-run patterns. The article resuscitates Fernand Braudel’s
notion of the longue duree to propose a new cumulative approach to the study of the
long-run that complicates accounts that too starkly juxtapose precommunist and communist-era “legacies” on the present and argues that scholars should study how these
periods reinforce each other and jointly determine contemporary outcomes.
Keywords: democracy; long-run continuities; institutional change; postcommunism
Not only do all political processes occur in history and therefore call for knowledge of
their historical contexts, but also where and when political processes occur influence
how they occur.
Charles Tilly1
Authors’ Note: We thank Michael Bernhard, Anna Grzymala Busse, Jacques Rupnik, Jan Zielonka and
anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Please address correspondence to Harvard
University, 27 Kirkland St, Center for European Studies, Cambridge, MA 02138; e-mail: dziblatt@fas.
harvard.edu.
90
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 91
Introduction
The collapse of communist regimes in 1989–1991, the rolling democratic transitions across East Central, South-East European, and the East European peripheries
of Europe, the disintegration of communist federative states, and the emergence of
new states heralded not only the end of a fifty-year experiment with communism, it
also represented the latest moment in a century-long process of democratic transformations in Europe. The “outcast” states of Europe recovered their place as an intrinsic part of Europe and resumed their efforts that had begun in the nineteenth century,
to construct and sustain democratic institutions. Building liberal, democratic states
and rejoining Europe were after all the twin goals of the 1989 “refolutions.” In contrast with the failure of the earlier set of experiments with democracy in the post–
World War I period, the post-1989 democratization experience has been in many
ways unexpectedly successful for many formerly communist countries. One result
of these contrasting outcomes has been a lively debate about the causes of successful
transitions. But despite the debate, no one disputes one piece of evidence: the further
East you look, the lower the probability of liberal political and economic outcomes.
This article departs from conventional views that have described post-communist
experiences vis-à-vis other “third wave” regime transitions, and offers a different
historically oriented perspective on the post-communist democratization processes
of Eastern and Central Europe. We contend that if we only ground our analyses in
the superficially similar “transitions” of other world regions (e.g., Latin America,
Africa) we will miss important issues in the study of the region. If, on the other hand,
we study the post-1989 transformations within the context of the century-long, often
tumultuous but distinctly European democratization process that has transformed the
continent since at least 1789, we come face-to-face with a new set of important questions. To compare the post-communist experience to democratic experiments in
other temporally proximate third-wave cases in other world regions is to make the
mistake of the drunkard whose search for his keys leads him to the spot he can most
easily see—under the lamppost.
We therefore look beyond the most temporally obvious comparisons and reintegrate Eastern and Central Europe analytically back into European history. The result
is that a series of fascinating and important problems emerge whose resolution may
help us more thoroughly understand contemporary problems facing the region and
democratization processes more generally. We are not the first who point out that
Central and East European democratizations are distinctive if not sui generis.2 The
standard argument, however, emphasizes the unique nature of communist rule and
specific legacies that communist regimes left behind. In contrast, our claim is that
post-communist political transformations (outside of the former Soviet Union but
including the Baltic states) should be conceptualized as a part of an ongoing and
long-term historical democratization process across the gradient of Europe’s continent,
from which the communist rule was but almost a temporary diversion. Moreover,
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92 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
being a constitutive part of the European democratization process means that the
contours and mechanisms of political transformations exhibit dynamics common to
earlier European instances of democratization as well as reflect the changing constitution of Europe.
We ask: “How does Central and Eastern Europe look one hundred years on?” On
the one hand, a long historical perspective suggests remarkable continuities with the
past. The dramatic moment of transition in 1989–1990, successful and failed political and economic reforms, patterns of state building, and the varied relation to the
European Union certainly have shaped democratization trajectories after communism in important ways. But these contemporary forces appear to do so only within
the confines of a mix of varying pre-communist inheritances that seem to set the
outer bounds of what is possible in the region. As others have noted,3 patterns of
politics, competing political discourses, policy choices, regime stability, levels of the
economic development, and the nature of institutional choices found in Central and
Eastern Europe today4 tend to correlate with patterns of politics, levels of development, regime stability, and institutional choices in the region in the pre-communist
period in the first half of the twentieth century. Also, even more fundamentally, the
old nineteenth-century territorial divisions seem to persist in their impact, despite
decades of changes that should have made them obsolete. For example, the historical
partitions of Poland, the split between Western and Eastern Ukraine, or Transylvania
and other parts of today’s Romania are still easily detectible in contemporary culture, politics, and economy.5 In sum, history thus appears to show puzzling continuities.
On the other hand, contingent political events, episodes of reforms, wars, and
crises themselves also have a power that should caution us against an excessive
determinism. Any scholar of the region knows that tragic experiences of war (genocide, population transfers, etc)6 followed by territorial changes, social and economic
transformations engineered by the communists, and events that challenged communist rule—whether 1956, 1968, 1980, or 1989—were not merely endogenous repetitions of the past; the reshaping of social and economic foundations of these societies
was fundamental; many disasters were inflicted and some were closely averted;
opportunities were disastrously missed, and history was not simply “preordained” by
“deep history.”7 Thus, we face a dilemma: how do we explain the region’s long-run
continuities while recognizing the effects of communist rule and the power of events
themselves? And, how do we systematically and convincingly make sense of the fact
that the distant past appears to shape current outcomes, despite the sharp discontinuity produced by the communist period while simultaneously being attuned to the fact
that human action can alter existing conditions?
The following article is not an empirical exercise but rather reflects on a series of
problems and elaborates a set of propositions that might be useful for scholars to
consider as they undertake research on the general phenomenon of long-run continuities in the region. We first outline some of the typical empirical puzzles that
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 93
motivate scholars of the region. Next, we propose a distinctive approach to studying
what Fernand Braudel originally called the longue durée.8 Rather than conceptualizing the longue durée, however, as Braudel did, as a centuries-long process in
which “mentalities” flow across time, we make four points that have particular relevance to Central and Eastern Europe today. First, we narrow our focus to emphasize
legacies flowing from the recent past—the nineteenth-century foundational arrival
of modern states in Europe; this period, beginning roughly in 1848, casts a particularly powerful shadow on contemporary politics and economics. Second, we highlight not only the impact of loosely flowing “mentalities” across time as crucial but
also the historical legacy of formal and informal institutions as well as patterns of
cultural identification and economic development emerging from this earlier period.
Third, rather than juxtaposing our argument to a notion of l’histoire événementielle,
as Braudel did, we think it is crucial in the communist and post-communist context
to focus on how these long-run “critical antecedents” intersected with events themselves, thereby altering political and economic life in profound ways.9 Finally, rather
than thinking of the longue durée as producing iron-clad legacies, we argue that
“legacies,” their meanings, and symbolic importance are themselves contested,
reconstructed, and the subject of competing narratives, explaining in part the postcommunist period’s predilection for “memory politics.”10 In sum, in the following
we reflect on how a reinvigorated notion of Braudel’s original concept of the longue
durée might be applied to a new set of research questions centered around the postcommunist struggles for democracy, one hundred years on.
Two Unexpected Paradoxes of the Post-communist Experience
Students of political and economic transformations in post-1989 Central and
Eastern Europe need to confront two paradoxes: first, why the communist experience appears to have meant so little for a significant number of countries that underwent swift transition to market economy, democracy, and successful integration into
the European Union. After all, the initial debates on prospects for consolidation of
democracy in the region were uniformly pessimistic in tenor. Post-communism was
considered, with some good reasons, to be the most unfriendly environment in
which to build liberal political and economic orders. Being a part of the former
Soviet Union was seen as the most detrimental to building democracy and markets.
Accordingly, scholars predicted the return to rule of “demagogues, priests and colonels”11 or the emergence of “low-performing, institutionally mixed market economies and incomplete, elitist, and exclusionary democracies.”12
Second, why after two decades of transformations with seemingly limitless
opportunities, similar goals and unprecedented levels of international support for
liberal outcomes, is there nonetheless such a surprising lack of convergence among
traditional subregions within the former Soviet bloc? While East Central Europe has
seen relative fast convergence with old EU countries and South East European countries
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94 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
Figure 1
Civil rights and political liberties in Europe, 1981–2009
Source: Freedom Housei
made some considerable progress, other subregions have endured stagnation and
authoritarian reversals. Moreover, the distance on almost every empirical indicator
among traditional subregions of the former Soviet bloc, as illustrated for example by
the graph in Figure 1 showing the Freedom House ratings of civil rights and political
liberties, seems to remain surprisingly and stubbornly stable.13 Trajectories of economic developments and welfare policies show similar patterns.
Conventional comparative democratization theory initially developed to account
for the third wave of democratization14 emphasized contingent choices of elite
actors, modes of transition and sequencing, elections and institutional choices, and
tended to downplay the role of structural, cultural, and historical factors. The result
is a literature that is unable to deal convincingly with the post-communist paradoxes
outlined above.15 Furthermore, while arguments that highlight the “legacies of communist rule” as a driver of all outcomes point in the right direction by taking history
more seriously, we emphasize that the substantial post-communist diversity in
regime and state-building outcomes in many other former communist countries
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 95
suggest these cases cannot be treated exclusively as a cluster of cases whose shared
communist legacies are all-powerful.
Instead, the way to unravel these paradoxes is to begin our analyses by recognizing the causal importance of the diverse pre-communist legacies in the region and to
regard these cases as a constitutive part of Europe’s longer historical democratization process and rooted in regional experiences during the transformative period of
the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, we need to analyze the contours of
contemporary Eastern and Central European transformations as part of a longue
durée, going back to the critical period of nineteenth-century modernization and the
period in the wake of World War I that includes the experiences of the communist
period. In this “path” as well as “context dependent” (i.e., the European context)
process of democratization and de-democratization, initial experiences may even
carry more weight for some dimensions of change than may more recent experiences. When viewed in this light, pre-communist and communist-era legacies are not
“alternative explanations” but rather often reinforce each other and have jointly
shaped a variety of contemporary outcomes. These outcomes include institutional
choices after 1989, the nature of active political cleavages, the proclaimed identity
of political actors, the main contours of the political discourse, patterns of partisan
affiliation, and, finally, the performance of democracy and degree of democratic
consolidation. In their impact on these outcomes, path- and context-dependent
dynamics are visible in specific cases, for example, that the lands of the Czech
Republic were industrialized before communist rule, shaped economic life under
communism, and appears to shape economic performance today.16 Whether a country experienced some form of democracy before the communist rule, as Poland did,
for example, mattered not only for the nature of communist rule but to democratization today.17 In addition, the very location of Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and
Ottoman Imperial boundaries in the pre-communist period affected not only the type
of communism during the communist period and patterns of the economic development but also the partisan identification and rates of electoral participation today.18
We need, in other words, to study the cumulative nature of pre-communist legacies, as well as moments of successful and failed liberalization reforms and democratization efforts during the period of communist rule to be able to assess the
diversity of initial conditions and different political opportunity structures that
emerged after 1989. Some further examples of pre-communist and communist-era
dynamics interacting to produce contemporary outcomes include Poland’s early
crisis-driven trajectory of political developments that produced the unprecedented
pattern of contentious liberalization under communist regime; this tendency, it has
been argued, is rooted in Poland’s early historical experiences with democracy, helping us understand Polish politics today.19 Similarly, we can track the historical roots
of the resurgence of right-wing politics in Hungary today not only to the brutal suppression of the 1956 revolution but also to lingering trauma of the Trianon treaty and
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96 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
the failed communist revolution in 1919. Also, the “velvet revolution” and the subsequent collapse of the Czechoslovak federation cannot be grasped without understanding the nature and defeat of the Czechoslovak Prague Spring in 1968, the
experiences of World War II, and, even further back, the Czech democratic tradition
and experiences over the last one hundred years. Thus, subregional differences and
country-specific trajectories from the pre-communist period persisted during the
communist period and remain visible today. How these episodes and trajectories
relate to post-communist, war, and pre-war experiences, while an emerging area of
research, remain only loosely theorized, and thus are an important lacunae in the
current scholarship.20
Making Sense of Continuity in the Face of Discontinuity:
Post-communism in Its European Context
Thus, it is evident we need to turn to history. But here we confront our central
challenge and theoretical dilemma: First, how precisely do we do this type of analysis? And, second, more fundamentally, how is it possible that historical legacies and
the longue durée matter so much in a region marked by such discontinuous change?
If the continuous flow of history faces such frequent ruptures, why does the past
matter so much?
It is our contention that legacies of the longue durée may ironically be more
important precisely in situations of discontinuous institutional changes. Such transformations after all, do not produce the incremental changes of formal rules and
continuous marginal adjustments that allow the gradual equilibration of formal
institutions and formal rules as well as the incremental shifting of interests and identities, as identified in the influential work of Thelen,21 Thelen and Streek, and Thelen
and Mahoney.22 In fact, we think that paradoxically, discontinuous changes may
open large chasms between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual
adjustments.23 Moreover, discontinuous changes produce institutional mimicry: formal institutions inherited from the old regime conceal and preserve their identity and
norms, which can then in turn quickly be resurrected in the changed conditions.24
The result is to reproduce and reinforce longue durée historical legacies precisely
because of the discontinuity in formal institutions.
This argument fills a gap in the literature on institutional change that typically
focuses on highly institutionalized contexts marked by an absence of frequent institutional ruptures. Also it builds on a growing interest among scholars in the issue of
historical legacies. If we look at recent empirical work by Darden, Darden and
Grzymala Busse, Pop-Eleches and Tucker, and Wittenberg, they all seek to make
sense of long-run continuities in a way that does not simply point to “deep causes”
without also seeking to combine such explanation with a focus on causal mechanisms
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 97
and more proximate causes that themselves are crucial to any successful theoretical
account.25 Whether it is the persistence of partisan loyalties carried by religious
institutions (e.g., Wittenberg) or imperial legacies (e.g., Darden), or the persistence
of voting patterns due to pre-communist rural social structure and landholding inequality,26 one point is clear: the task of understanding how long-run “critical antecedents”27 shape outcomes despite—or even perhaps because of—historical ruptures
sits at the forefront of work on the region.
Yet to argue that long-run continuities determine contemporary outcomes, however, is to enter normatively and methodologically treacherous terrain;28 one can
easily be accused of determinism, being an advocate of “deep history,” and being
unwilling to accept the possibilities of change. We are by no means advocates of
such an ahistorical and fundamentally atheoretical image of stasis and continuity.
Indeed, it is precisely our goal to identify and point to strategies for resolving the
dilemma that continuity constrains human action despite our impression that events
also matter.
How, then, do we proceed? First, we suggest scholars ought to place Central and
Eastern Europe’s contemporary developments within their European historical context. Indeed, the idea that long run continuities are at work in shaping present-day
variation is not distinctive to the post-communist region. Victor Perez-Diaz, for
example, explores the Spanish democratic transition not as an example of third-wave
transition but rather within the context of broader European political transformations. He emphasizes the European roots of the Spanish transition, noting,
By the mid-seventies the economic, social, and cultural institutions of Spain were already
quite close to those of Western Europe and the cultural beliefs, normative orientations,
and attitudes of the people that accompanied the workings of these institutions had
become fairly similar to those of other Europeans.29
In short, what we can call the context specificity of European experience of
democratization has played a major role in all transformations within the region,
from southern Europe in the 1970s and 1980s to Eastern Europe in the 1990s and
should be at the center of analysis.
Second, we argue that the study of this region can benefit from a series of larger
debates within political science more generally that have looked at how long-run
factors intersect with short-run moments of critical juncture. At the center of this
revival of interest in these issues is the idea that the long run’s impact does not dissolve in moments of critical juncture but has an enduring impact in its interaction
with events. These ideas of what has been called a “historical turn” have been
elaborated more fully elsewhere.30 But the approach we outline here is to recognize
that events and episodes do remake history but often not entirely as intended.
Political actors even in decisive moments of change face the inheritance of the past,
and are thereby both constrained and empowered by the past. While change is possible, the outer bounds of change are to a significant degree the product of “deep
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98 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
history.” We can deploy some of insights of Capoccia and Ziblatt to elaborate this
argument in three points.
First, following Capoccia and Ziblatt, we argue that “history should be read ‘forward’ and not ‘backward.’”31 This means quite precisely that analysis should simply
not take contemporary outcomes and try to link these to historical causes. Instead, it
is more useful to turn to historical turning points themselves—whether 1848, 1918,
1945, 1948, 1956, 1968, 1980, or 1989—to “undertake a thorough analysis of the
ideologies, resources, and institutional legacies shaping the choices of actors
involved in the process of institution-building”32 in these moments and then try to
link these to long-run outcomes. In East European studies, for example, the fate of
small nations in the region was too often seen as an inevitable outcome of international power politics (e.g., Trianon, Yalta) over which domestic actors had no control. While there may be much truth in such views, the tyranny of international
factors is not complete and domestic actors still have room for maneuver. Examining
the role of domestic actors, their political battles, and the long-run outcomes of these
political battles in these key moments of institutional change is a promising avenue
of research because it allows us to see how contingency, events, and “critical antecedents” intersect.33
Second, we should not view history as “synchronized”—that is, we should not
assume that all good things always move together simultaneously (including the key
institutional elements of democracy). Instead, it is crucial to remember that democracy is a cluster of discrete institutions that often emerges “one institution-at-atime.”34 The consequence of adopting an “asychronic” perspective on institutional
change is that the analyst is not as puzzled as she otherwise would be by the often
surprising sequence and timing of how politics actually unfolds. As Timothy Garton
Ash famously noted in November 1989 describing unfolding regime changes in the
region, “in Poland it took 10 years, in Hungary 10 months, in the GDR ten weeks,
perhaps in Czechoslovakia it will take 10 days.“35 This situation raises a number of
critical analytical challenges. And indeed as William Sewell persuasively argues
more generally, but in a way that is certainly applicable to democratization,
That there are a diversity of temporalities operating in any present raises difficult analytical challenges. . . . Which social processes, with which temporalities, will emerge
as dominant in an event that mixes them together? How, and when, do short-term
processes override, deflect, or transform long-term processes? How do long-term
trends reassert themselves in situations where they seem to have been eclipsed by more
pressing political processes?36
A further consequence of such a move is that one can make sense of the proliferation of hybrid regimes in the post-communist world.37 This is a perspective that
can also make sense of the frequent disjuncture that exists between the extent of
liberalization in subnational and national levels of government in the region. In the
authoritarian period, for example, some regions, in Yugoslavia (e.g., Slovenia)
liberalized while the national polity did not. In the democratic period, as in Latin
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 99
America, subnational pockets of authoritarianism have emerged and coexist within
nominally democratic national regimes.38 While some recent cases such as the post1989 East European democratic transitions might at first glance be viewed as exemplars of “wholesale changes,” some leading accounts have reinterpreted institutional
changes of democratization even here as a long-run, and often gradual, process.39
Third, the research strategy that suggests itself from this view is, therefore, as
Capoccia and Ziblatt have noted, to analyze episodes of institutional reform, which
could be moments during the communist regime or even earlier and how these episodes are linked to each other over time. As Capoccia and Ziblatt note, this
approach,
. . . shows among other things, that conflicts over democratic institutions and liberalization do not occur “sealed-off” from each other, merely reflecting domestic conditions at the time: instead, past or concurrent experiences of successful or failed
democratization or liberalization (from other countries as well as within the same
country) arm democracy's opponents and proponents with competing causal narratives or “lessons” from the past, thus significantly shaping their behavior.41
For our purpose of studying the long run, the benefit of this perspective in the
post-communist environment is clear. Traditional economic accounts of democratization that almost single-mindedly emphasize the impact of class actors on democratization have great difficulty with post-communist cases because different and
often underappreciated factors were at work in these cases. For example, nationalism, as students of the post-communist region certainly understand, not only shapes
democratization trajectories but it is fundamental in generating liberalization and
democratization processes. Similarly, as Capoccia and Ziblatt also note, political
parties are often an underappreciated factor in democratization.42 In this respect, in
the post-communist world, it is necessary to examine the impact of the communist
parties themselves in post-1945 Eastern Europe, as key actors in shaping democracy’s prospects.43 Finally, in sum, by analyzing specific episodes, rather than downplaying structural factors, we can analyze long-run legacies precisely in the contexts
in which they make themselves felt: in moments of institutional redesign and episodes of important institutional change.
Taken together, these three points suggest that democratization as well as dedemocratization are processes that may occur in events, crises, and moments that are
important because they are crucial moments of “divergence” (Slater and Simmons,
2010) that send countries on different paths. In Europe as a whole, the usual narrative
points to the “turning points” of critical junctures in 1848, 1918, 1945, and 1989.44
For Eastern Europe, de-democratization or failed democratization episodes (e.g.,
1948, 1956, 1968, 1980) are equally crucial. Because of the frequency of these
disjunctures, however, our final point is a counterintuitive one: we contend that
the region as a whole is particularly susceptible to the impact of preconditions or
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100 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
“background factors” (i.e., longue durée legacies) that may assert themselves in such
disjunctive moments. In short, it may ironically be that the longue durée rears its
head above all in moments of great apparent upheaval and change.
Reinterpreting the Cases: The Theoretical and Empirical
Implications of a “Long-Run” View in Post-communist Studies
The views outlined above may be useful for understanding post-communist
political developments because the way social scientists traditionally conceive of
modern East European history is flawed in three fundamental ways: first, the fascination with the sharpness of discontinuities and critical breaks have produced a
fragmented history focusing on discrete periods that have overlooked important
continuities. Second, the importance of the connections between the Eastern and
Western parts of the continent have also been profoundly underestimated. Finally, at
least in comparative politics, the study of the region has been running away from
history. So-called comparative communism before and transitology more recently
tended to disregard the historical context and distinct historical trajectories of specific countries.
To understand the 1989 democratizations and their outcome in particular, we
need to acknowledge that during the twentieth century Central and Eastern Europe
experienced at least three major moments/episodes of real or, at least, potential
openings that could have resulted in democratic breakthroughs and the consolidation
of democracy: in 1918, 1945, and 1989. After 1918, new democratic regimes were
established in the region, but faced multiple domestic and international challenges,
and thus degenerated into various types of hybrid and authoritarian regimes everywhere except for Czechoslovakia. The failure of pre-war democracy and modernization in the region followed by the horrors of World War II diminished support for
Western-style democracy, and thus eased the way for the post-1945 communist
takeover. For example, the restored Czechoslovak state (the only surviving democracy in the intra-war period) had a functioning multiparty system with an apolitical
state administration; it also recognized non-communist leaders and experienced
relatively clean initial elections. The ineptitude of non-communist politicians and
left sympathies of the electorate (communists won 40 percent of the votes in de facto
free elections), however, were crucial and may well had been the main factor in the
successful communist takeover in 1948.
After 1945, democracy’s prospects were extremely limited despite the façade of
multiparty politics and elections. But even then, the alignment of political blueprints
and realities was not perfect and room for maneuver was greater than is traditionally
thought. As Schopflin notes,
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 101
The paradox of how politically weak and isolated communist parties were able to take
over Eastern Europe . . . is usually explained by reference to the presence of the Red
Army and the feebleness of the Western response to Soviet expansion after 1945. . . .
The problem with this interpretation is that while it properly focuses attention on Soviet
actions and Western inaction, it largely ignores Eastern Europe itself and implies that
East Europeans watched helplessly as external forces decided their fate. In particular,
it suggests that at no point did East Europeans have any choice over their future. This
appears to be a considerable oversimplification of what actually happened.45
Unlike after 1918, when newly emerged East European states introduced liberal
political and economic institutions only to experience the gradual ascent of statist
policies and authoritarian rule, the post-1945 “democratic interlude” ended quickly
with the communist takeover across the region by 1948. After 1989, on the other
hand, successful consolidation of democracy became a norm in East Central Europe
but faced fundamental challenges in other parts of the former Soviet bloc. Rather
than viewing these dates as discrete and unrelated watershed moments, we contend
that it is more useful to view them as three critical junctures cumulatively, leaving
in place long-lasting legacies that shaped political trajectories of countries of the
region.
It is commonsensical to argue that the communist takeovers after 1945 cannot be
fully comprehended without accounting for the disappointments, economic failures,
and authoritarian experiences of the inter-war period and the devastations and
atrocities of the war that followed. While communism seemed to be a fundamental
departure from historical trajectories and the traditions of these countries, continuities between pre– and post–World War II states have been frequently noted.
Rothschild, for example, emphasizes striking continuities in both the form and styles
of governmental activity.46 Kitschelt points to the persistence of specific bureaucratic traditions.47 Jowitt notes striking social continuities he describes as neotraditionalism.48 Others have investigated the continuity of East European intelligentsia
and its cultural preferences and politics.49 This suggests an important conclusion:
different East European state socialisms in the region exhibited their pre-1945 roots
more extensively than we often tend to assume. The continuity between the precommunist and the communist period and the resulting variety of state socialism
thus is crucial for understanding a range of attributes of these societies.
In contrast to the understudied continuity between pre-communist and communist periods, the debates about the legacy of communist rule for post-1989 politics
have been extensive.50 While multiple continuities have been emphasized in all possible dimensions, scholars tend to understand communist legacies as a package of
variables common to all post-communist societies with largely negative consequences for the subsequent politics. But “real” historical legacies of communism are
context specific, not system specific. We argue, therefore, that post-1989 developments need to be analyzed in the context of post-1945 trajectories of political conflicts and struggles in specific locations. This period of seeming stasis and forced
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102 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
standardization was dotted with episodes of liberalization and de-liberalization,
hopes for political change and bitter disappointments, partial reforms, and their
reversals. These episodes left enduring legacies that shaped both democratic breakthroughs and post-1989 developments.51 Yet the post-1989 trajectories also reflected
the pre-communist legacies in institutional and policy choices, political tastes, discourses, and cultural orientations. Not a single country in the region, for example,
departed from the form of government and electoral institutions it established during
the first episode of democratization in the post–World War I period. More worryingly, some of the pre-war political discourses are functioning remarkably well,
despite profound change in social conditions and ethnic composition of East
European states.
While historians and political scientists have studied the emergence and failure of
democracies in the region during the inter-war period as a part of the general
European political trajectory, the other two critical junctures (i.e., 1945 and 1989)
have been treated differently. They are normally examined as discrete events and as
basically intra-Soviet bloc affairs with no connection to West European experiences.
West Europeans were seen as spectators who had no real capacity to shape internal
events within the Soviet sphere of domination, and 1945 was considered to be the
ancient past in 1989. While this view emphasizing internal developments in communist states and the capricious nature of Soviet imperial domination may be partially true, the connection to Europe was a critical dimension of Central European
dissent and reform communism during the communist period. As Norman Davies
noted, “the concept of Europe was no less alive in the East than in the West. Soviet
tyranny was very effective in promoting the European ideal by default. Citizens of
the former Soviet bloc were mightily impressed by Western Europe’s food mountains; but there is every reason to believe that their aspirations to rejoin ‘Europe’ had
a spiritual as well as a material dimension.”52 Thus, we suggest that understanding
of democratization in Central and Eastern Europe would benefit not only from a
longer-term historical perspective but also how these long-run factors influenced
episodes of liberalization, democratization, and de-democratizations but also from
recognition of the European connection as well as diffusion of European ideas and
its limits.53
The most significant challenge for the approach we propose is a methodological
one. How do we investigate empirically situations in which historical continuities
are interspaced with deep discontinuities that remake not only political and economic institutions but also the territorial and ethnic composition of specific countries? What are the mechanisms that reproduce norms, institutions, mentalities, and
belief systems, despite often revolutionary transformations. In short, how do
continuities persist? We do not have answers to these questions. It seems, however,
that the standard tools developed in comparative politics, such as process-tracing
strategies, have limited utility in cases with deep discontinuities. Such approaches
must certainly be combined with the multiple methods comparativists have at their
disposal (e.g., historical, quantitative methods), along with methods used by histori-
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 103
ans and anthropologists. The question of what mechanisms account for long-run
historical continuities is a cutting-edge area of research. Analysts such as Darden,
Wittenberg, and others have emphasized a quite disparate list of plausible mechanisms, including informal institutions, religious and educational institutions, political culture, communities and social capital, families, and socialization process. All
of these ideas need to be considered seriously and their role needs to be assessed
empirically. Thus, investigating continuities requires multiple research strategies,
disciplinary cooperation, and consideration of multiple mechanisms.
Conclusion
In this essay, we have elaborated a series of claims about the role of the longue
durée in contemporary post-communist societies. But above all, we offer a simple
insight. In order to understand the processes of democratization and outcomes of
democratic transformations across the former communist world, we need to treat
seriously both path dependency (the individual trajectories of specific countries and
longue durée dynamic) as well as context dependency (the affinity to the general
process of European democratization).
The problem of historical continuities, especially in cases that experienced profound political and economic discontinuities, represents a substantial challenge to
comparative politics. Almost all work in historical sociology and comparative politics in the last decades after all has focused on discontinuities and major reorderings
of social, political and economic life. Scholars study revolutions, rebellions, social
movements, the formations of states, regime changes, and other major reforms,
armed with “a loose synthesis of Marxian and Weberian historical narratives [that]
directed attention to specific types of historical discontinuities”54 Research on continuities, reproduction, and durability has been until recently less well developed,
except for some work on the persistence of suboptimal organizations, practices, and
institutions. These suboptimal outcomes are typically explained as results of a powerful path-dependent dynamic. Such a perspective, however, has difficulty coping
with the sharp discontinuities that ought to have reshuffled politics in Eastern and
Central Europe in fundamental ways. Thus, understanding outcomes of postcommunist transformations and East European politics in general requires a shift in
empirical and analytical efforts from making sense of discontinuity to understanding
the nature of continuities and the interaction of continuity and discontinuity.
We also have called attention to longue durée historical legacies. We have also
argued that longue durée legacies are ironically more important in situations of
discontinuous institutional change because these types of transformations do not
produce incremental changes but instead open up major and enduring gaps
between formal and informal institutions and generate institutional mimicry, pre-
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104 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
venting gradual adjustments, and in turn reproduce and reinforce long-run historical legacies.
In sum, in saying that the long run and short run have interacted in subtle ways
in Central and Eastern Europe, we have, in some sense, stated for students of politics
and history the self-evident; and to bolster our case, we end this essay by quoting a
well-known German philosopher: “Men make their own history, but they do not
make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but
under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”55
Notes
1. C. Tilly, “Why and How History Matters,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political
Analysis, ed. R. Goodin and C. Tilly (Oxford University Press, 2006), 420.
2. See, e.g, V. Bunce, “Should Transitologists Be Grounded,” Slavic Review 54 (1995): 111–27;
V. Bunce, “Comparing East and South,” in Democracy after Communism, ed. L. Diamond and M. Plattner
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 18–32; V. Bunce, “Rethinking Recent
Democratization: Lessons from the Postcommunist Experience,” World Politics 55 (2003): 167; M.
McFaul, “The Fourth Wave of Democracy and Dictatorship: Noncooperative Transitions in the Postcommunist World,” World Politics 54 (2002): 212. For the defense of the cross-regional comparative
perspective, see Phillipe Schmitter and Terry Lynn Karl, “The Conceptual Travels of Transitologists and
Consolidologists: How Far to the East Should They Attempt to Go,” Slavic Review 53 (1994): 172.
3. See, e.g., A. Janos, “Continuity and Change in Eastern Europe: Strategies of Post-communist
Politics,” East European Politics and Societies 8 (1994): 1; A. Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern
World: The Politics of the Borderlands from Pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2002); Herbert Kitschelt, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gabor Toka, Postcommunist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999); J. Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty: Church Institutions and
Electoral Continuity in Hungary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Keith Darden and
Anna Grzymala Busse, “The Great Divide: Literacy, Nationalism, and the Communist Collapse,” World
Politics 59 (2006): 81.
4. Adam Przeworski et al. report the striking continuity in constitutional choices in countries that
experienced democracy Adam Przeworski, Michale Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, and Fernando
Limongi, “What Makes Democracy Endure,” The Global Divergence of Democracies, ed. L. Diamond
and M. Plattner (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 167.
5. See, e.g., K. Jasiewicz, “The Past Is Never Dead: Identity, Class, and Voting Behavior in
Contemporary Poland,” East European Politics and Societies 23, no. 4 (2009): 491–508; R. Szporluk,
“The Making of Modern Ukraine: The Western Dimension,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 25, no. 1/2
(2001): 57; G. Sasse, “The ‘New’ Ukraine: A State of Regions,’” Regional and Federal Studies 11, no. 3
(2001): 69; G. Sasse, “Ukraine: The Role of Regionalism,” Journal of Democracy 21, no. 3 (2010): 99.
6. See T. Snyder, “The Historical Reality of Eastern Europe,” East European Politics and Societies
23, no. 1 (2007): 7.
7. We also agree with Jeffrey Kopstein that the communist-led coercive modernization irrevocably
altered many critical dimensions of traditional social orders in the region. See J. Kopstein, “1989 as a
Lens for the Communist Past and Post-Communist Future,” Contemporary European History 18, no. 3
(2009): 289.
8. Fernand Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
9. Dan Slater and Erica Simmons, “Informative Regress: Critical Antecedents in Comparative
Politics,” Comparative Political Science 43, no. 7 (2010): 886.
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 105
10. See Jan Kubik and Michael Bernhard, “A Theory of the Politics of Memory,” in Twenty Years
After: 1989 and the Politics of Memory, ed. M. Bernhard and J. Kubik (Manuscript 2012).
11. K. Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1992).
12. B. Greskovits, The Political Economy of Protest and Patience (Budapest: Central European
University, 1998).
13. See, e.g., J. Rupnik, “The Postcommunist Divide,” Journal of Democracy 10, no. 1 (1999): 57;
G. Ekiert, J. Kubik, and M. Vachudowa, “Democracy in Postcommunist World: An Unending Quest,”
East European Politics and Societies, 21, no. 1 (2007): 1.
14. See, e.g., Guillermo O’Donnell and Phillipe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); S. Huntington, The Third Wave (Tulsa:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition
and Consolidation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
15. For limitations of this approach see, e.g., T. Carothers, “The End of the Transition Paradigm,”
Journal of Democracy 13 (2002): 5; and Larry Diamond, Marc Plattner, and Philip Costopoulos, eds.,
Debates on Democratization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).
16. See Janos, East Central Europe in the Modern World; J. Kopstein, “Post-Communist Democracy:
Legacies and Outcomes,” Comparative Politics 35, no. 2 (2003): 231.
17. G. Pop-Eleches, “Historical Legacies and Post-communist Regime Change,” The Journal of
Politics 69, no. 4 (2007): 908.
18. Keith Darden, Resisting Occupation: Mass Schooling and the Creation of Durable National
Loyalties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Forthcoming, 2013).
19. See, e.g., Grzegorz Ekiert and Jan Kubik, Rebellious Civil Society (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press 1999), chap. 2.
20. For efforts to bridge these stages in East European developments see, e.g., J. Gross, “Social
Consequences of War: Preliminaries to the Study of Imposition of Communist Regimes in East Central
Europe,” East European Politics and Societies 3, no. 2 (1989): 198; Wittenberg, Crucibles of Political Loyalty.
21. K. Thelen, How Institutions Evolve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
22. Wolfgang Streeck and Kathleen Thelen, eds., Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in
Advanced Political Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Kathleen Thelen and James
Mahoney, eds., Explaining Institutional Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
23. The question of how we know such “chasms” exist is a difficult but important empirical question
and is one that certainly deserves greater research attention than it has received to date. For an effort to
address some of these issues, see Steven Levitsky and Gretchen Helmke, eds., Informal Institutions and
Democracy: Lessons from Latin America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).
24. E.g., many pre-communist civil society traditions and formal organizations survived under communist rule, especially on the local level. They served as hidden carriers of local traditions and norms and
provided the space for shelter from direct political interference. See J. Kurczewski, ed., Lokalne spolecznosci obywatelskie (Warsaw: OBS Warszawa, 2003); Joanna Kurczewska, “Tradycje w przestrzeni
lokalnego spoleczestwa obywatelskiego,” in Samoorganizacja Spoleczenstwa Polskiego: III sector I
wspolnoty lokalne w jednoczacej sie Europie, ed. Piotr Glinski, Barbara Lewenstein, and Andrzej Sicinski
(Warsaw: IFiS PAN, 2004), 302–32; Anna Gasior-Niemiec and Piotr Glinski, “Polish Tradition of Selforganization, Social Capital and the Challenge of Europeanisation,” in Social Capital and Governance,
ed. Fran Adam (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007a), 237.
25. For the paradigmatic statement of the need to combine “proximate” with “deep” causes for successful theory building, see H. Kitschelt, “Accounting for Communist Regime Diversity: What Counts as
a Good Cause,” Capitalism and Democracy, ed. G. Ekiert and S. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 49.
26. Konstantin Kashin and Daniel Ziblatt, “A Missing Historical Variable? Landholding Inequality
and Voter Turnout in Germany, 1895-2009” (Paper presented at Council of European Studies annual
meeting, Barcelona, Spain, June 20–22, 2011).
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106 East European Politics and Societies and Cultures
27. Slater and Simmons, “Informative Regress,” 886.
28. See Kitschelt, “Accounting for Communist Regime Diversity,” 49.
29. V. Perez-Diaz, The Return of Civil Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17.
30. See Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Ziblatt, eds.,“The Historical Turn in Democratization Studies:
A New Research Agenda for Europe and Beyond,” Comparative Political Studies 43(2010); see Slater
and Simmons “Informative Regress,” 886; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Search for
American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
31. Capoccia and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies,” 939.
32. Ibid.
33. Slater and Simmons, “Informative Regress.”
34. See, e.g., D. Ziblatt, “How Did Europe Democratize?” World Politics 58 (2006): 311; Capoccia
and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies,” 939.
35. T. Garton Ash, Magic Lantern (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
36. W. Sewell, Logics of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005), 9.
37. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of
Democracy 132 (2002): 51.
38. On Latin America, see E. Gibson, “Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Democratic
Countries,” World Politics 58, no. 1 (2005): 101.
39. See Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich Preuss, Institutional Design in Postcommunist Societies:
Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
40. Giovanni Capoccia and Daniel Kelemen, “The Study of Critical Junctures: Theory, Narrative and
Counterfactuals in Historical Institutionalism,” World Politics 59 (April 2007): 341–69.
41. Capoccia and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies,” 940.
42. Capoccia and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies,” 949–52.
43. See A. Grzymala Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002).
44. Capoccia and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies,” 941.
45. G. Schopflin, Politics in Eastern Europe (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 1993).
46. J. Rothschild, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993).
47. Kitschelt et al., Post-communist Party Systems.
48. Jowitt, New World Disorder, chapter on neo-traditionalism.
49. See, e.g., George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power
(Brighton: Harvester Press, 1979); Z. Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and
Change,” Eastern European Politics and Societies 5 (1987): 162; Gil Eyal, Ivan Szeleny, and Eleanor
Townsley, Making Capitalism without Capitalists (London: Verso, 1998); G. Ekiert, “The End of
Communism in Central and Eastern Europe: The Last Middle Class Revolution?” Political Power and
Social Theory 21 (2010): 99.
50. Jowitt, New World Disorder; Zoltan Barany and Ivan Volgyes, eds., The Legacies of Communism
in Eastern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1995); Beverly Crawford and Arend
Lijphart eds., Liberalization and Leninist Legacies: Comparative Perspective on Democratic Institutions
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Grzymala Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past;
Grzegorz Ekiert, and Stephen E. Hanson, eds. Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe:
Assessing the Legacy of Communist Rule (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Kopstein,
“Post-Communist Democracy,” 231; Michael Bernhard and Timothy Nordstrom, “Communist Legacies
and Democratic Survival in Comparative Perspective,” 2010, Unpublished paper; G. Pop-Elches,
“Historical Legacies”; G. Pop- Eleches and J. Tucker, “Communist Legacies, and Political Values and
Behavior: A Theoretical Framework with an Application to Political Party Trust” Comparative Politics
43, no. 4 (2011): 379–408; J. Wittenberg, “What Is a Historical Legacy?” (Paper presented at the annual
meeting for the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, September 2–5, 2010).
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Ekiert and Ziblatt / Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe 107
51. See, e.g., G. Ekiert, The State against Society: Political Crises and Their Aftermath in East
Central Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); and G. Ekiert, “Rebellious Poles:
Cycles of Protest and Popular Mobilization Under State-Socialism, 1945-1989,” Working paper series,
Advanced Study Center, International Institute, University of Michigan, 1995–1996, no. 5.
52. N. Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 1058.
53. Capoccia and Ziblatt, “Historical Turn in Democratization Studies.”
54. E. Clemens, “Toward a Historicized Sociology: Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence,”
Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007): 527.
55. K. Marx, 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).
Grzegorz Ekiert is professor of government and director of the Center for European Studies at Harvard
University. His published books include The State Against Society (1996), Rebellious Civil Society (with
J. Kubik, 1999), and Capitalism and Democracy in Central and Eastern Europe (coedited with S. Hanson,
2003). His current projects explore civil society development in new democracies in Central Europe and
East Asia.
Daniel Ziblatt is professor of government at Harvard University. He is the author of Structuring the State
(2006) and a forthcoming book titled Conservative Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in
Europe, 1848-1950. His current work focuses on historical approaches to the study of democratization
and authoritarianism.
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